Hand held tools have progressed over the centuries from those of the rudest quality, such as sticks dragged upon the ground for plows, to bladed shovels and spades, shears, hammers, chisels, knives, forks and spoons. Always each tool had but a single job: the shovel and the spade to replace the hands in digging; the hoe and the plow to take the place of sticks for furrowing and breaking the soil; shears, saws, and clippers to take up cutting of vegetation. In the home and in the kitchen, it has been much the same: kitchen implements replaced the ruder functions of fingers and teeth for eating and cutting, and of sticks for stirring. Thus one who worked the soil needed constantly at hand a variety of instruments: for farming, a plow, a harvester, a shovel, a scythe, a baler, a pitchfork; for gardening, a shovel, a rake, a spade, a trowel, a hoe, a pair of clippers, and occasionally a saw or knife. In the house, the variety has been less, but the utility has not been there either.
Development has been slow. Even today, with the integration of gasoline engines and electric motors, it is the rule that one tool performs one job; and the job that tool does has been done in essentially the same way by essentially identical tools for many hundreds of years. At most, the tool differs from its predecessors only in its source of power: tractors tow plows essentially identical to those of ancient times; hedge clippers work in essentially the same fashion as hand held models; even backhoes lend mere power to the digging of shovel blades or hoes. And so today, thousands of years since the beginnings of plant husbandry and home economics, people work the same basic implements, one implement at a time, and take to work each time the same array of hand held tools.
In the modern kitchen, even with the amazing array of appliances available to today's homemaker, many common chores are either still rudely done or ineffectively accomplished with available hand implements. For example, scooping hard ice cream from the bottom of a container, or cleaning out a pumpkin are chores best relegated to the punishment list.
And to do so at low cost, through the provision of a simple, strong, elegant, and durable implement is innovation.
What is needed in the area of hand held tools for kitchen and garden is a single tool to cut and scoop fruits and vegetables and commodities from containers and still be available to loosen, dig, and furrow soil, to weed or plant effectively and efficiently with just one instrument, and to remove, replace, and cultivate plants without need of a box full of implements.